The pre-patriarchal, "matricentric" period of Old Europe flourished from around 6500 B.C. until the Aryan invasions around 3500 BC. For the last 5500 years, patriarchy - an archetypal pattern of oppressive male governance - has been an integral characteristic of Western civilization. What does it mean, not simply for the personal fulfilment of women, but for the destiny of the Earth and the viability of the human species?

Maya giving birth to the Buddha, holding the branch of a tree.

Patriarchy, western history & the destiny of the Earth

When the apparent success of the earlier matricentric period is compared with the devastation of the Earth resulting from the civilizational order that followed, we have a comprehensive critique of the Western civilizational process that has probably never been surpassed. We are confronted with a profound reversal of values. The entire course of Western civilization is seen as vitiated by patriarchy - the aggressive, plundering, male domination of our society.

If we inquire into the driving forces that have evoked this critical re-evaluation of Western civilization, we can identify them as the rising consciousness of women and the devastation of all the basic living forms of the Earth presently taking place in consequence of the male-dominated regimes that have existed during this period. The new mode of ecological consciousness now emerging sees the new period of the Earth community as having a basic nurturing aspect that tends more toward traditional feminine than toward masculine qualities. There are indeed religious, cosmological, biological, and historical reasons for considering the feminine as having a special role in our thinking about the Earth.

Our most prominent illustration of male rule over the extended tribal family is found in the patriarchal period in earliest biblical narratives, prior to establishment of separate roles for priest and prophet. Even more important is the patria potestas in Roman law. In this period the father had absolute rights over his entire family, including the right to impose capital punishment. The extended family was a total possession. The father owned everything and decided everything….When joined with the heroic leadership ideals of [later] barbarian peoples, the tradition of rule by male warrior personalities was well established in the European world.

Ecclesiastically, patriarchy designates the supreme centres of prestige in the [Christian] church. The four great patriarchies of the Eastern Christian church are Constantinople, Jersusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch. In the West the supreme patriarchate is centered in Rome. Since religious authority in the West has always been exercised by a male priesthood and required immediate and total acceptance by the believing community, this, too, contributed mightily to the sense of patriarchal responsibility for the unfolding of Western history.

From these beginnings the term patriarchy has now been brought forward as a way of indicating the larger sources of responsibility for what is happening not only with women, but also with the total civilizational structure of our society and even with the planet itself. The sense of patriarchy has now evolved as the archetypal pattern of oppressive governance by men with little regard for the well-being or personal fulfilment of women, for the more significant human values, or for the destiny of the Earth itself.

The Venus of Brassempouy, a fragmentary ivory figurine from the Upper Palaeolithic, 25,000 years old, it is one of the earliest realistic representations of the female face.

The basic pathology of western civilization

Choice of the term patriarchy for defining the basic pathology of Western civilization is being confirmed by historical evidence of an earlier, more benign civilizational period, a matricentric, matrifocal or matriarchal period. Judy Chicago concludes that ”all archaeological evidence indicates that these matriarchal cultures were egalitarian, democratic, peaceful. But female-oriented agricultural societies gradually gave way to a male-dominated political state in which occupational specialization, commerce, social stratification, and militarism developed.”

Change from this earlier period to a dominant patriarchal type of civilizational process took place in Old Europe, apparently with the invading Aryan Indo-European peoples, beginning around 4500 BC, the period from which we trace the most profound determinations of our Western mode of consciousness. In the words of Marija Gimbutas, “The earliest European civilization was savagely destroyed by the patriarchal element, and it never recovered, but its legacy lingered in the substratum which nourished further European cultural development.” Those proposing this reversal of values are not arguing exactly from philosophical principles, but from historical realities and from our planetary peril, as well as from the deepest realms of the human psyche.

The human is nonviable in its present mode of patriarchy

The historical mission of the present is to introduce a more integral period of Earth development, a period when a mutually enhancing human-earth relationship might be established—if indeed the human is to prove itself to be a viable species on a viable planet. That the human is nonviable in its present mode of partriarchal functioning seems to be quite clear.

Even in this period of patriarchal dominance the heritage of the earlier matricentric phase has continued as an undercurrent within Western cultural traditions. Matricentric ways of thinking and their associated rituals seem to be among the compoment elements of our submerged cultural traditions. They carry on an earlier wisdom associated with alchemy, astrology, the pagan nature rituals, and the hermetic teachings. These hidden traditions, considered destructive and unacceptable within the religious-humanist traditions of Western society, need reconsideration for the contributions they make to our understanding of the universe, its deeper modes of functioning, and the proper role of the human. They carry some of the most creative aspects of our civilization. In their symbolic modes of expression, especially, they enable us to go beyond the rational processes derivative from the classical philosophers and our later theologies. Through these traditions we have recovered our understanding of the archetypal world of the unconscious.

As we look back on the Western historical process, we can identify four patriarchal establishments that have been in control of Western history over the centuries. However benign our view of these establishments or however brilliant in some of their achievements, we must observe that they have become progressively virulent in their destructive powers, until presently they are bringing about the closing down of all the basic life systems of the planet.

These four establishments are: the classical empires, the ecclesiastical establishment, the nation-state, and the modern corporation. The four are exclusively male-dominated and primarily for fulfilment in terms of the human as envisaged by men. Women had minimal if any consistent role in the direction of these establishments.

First patriarchal establishment: classical empires

Gustave Boulanger: The Slave Market

These empires had their precedent in the sacred rulers that appeared in Sumeria and in Egypt some 5000 years ago. They were identified by Karl Wittfogel as “the harshest expression of total power”. When we look at the grandeur of these civilizations and at their successors in Assyria and Babylonia, we can only wonder at so much oppression coexisting with such stupendous achievements….In terms of fully organized political rule over a diverse association of peoples, the earliest of the empires was the Persian empire under Cyrus in the sixth century BC. Then came the Macedonian empire of Alexander and the Roman Empire in the Western world. In the East came the sequence of Chinese empires…In India the imperial process produced Asoka in the third century BC, one of the most benign of the great rulers of the period.

This sequence of empires was succeeded in the West by the Byzantine empire, the Holy Roman empire in Europe, then the later empires with a dominant presence of the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French and the British – all overseas – while the Russians expanded their empire throughout the Eurasian continent.

The triumphal achievements of imperial personalities were extolled in epic poetry such as the Homeric accounts of the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Aeniad of Virgil…These epic stories became the inspiration of succeeding generations.To doubt these ideals or to fail in enthusiasm for these wars, whether of defence or conquest, would be to doubt not only the human process, but also the divine disposition of the universe.

Second patriarchal establishment: ecclesiatical christianity

In the sacred writings of the Bible we find a warring deity and warrior ideals. If a more peaceful teaching did arise in the gospels, it did not survive the challenge that arose in later centuries when conflict appeared as the way for survival. In the age of chivalry, efforts were made to mitigate the violence by a sense of dedicated strength in the service of the weak who were assaulted by the strong. Once the natural and human worlds were envisaged as inherently subject to the strife for power, the way of peace and pacifism was no longer available. As with any addiction, it could only become worse. The pathology was too deep and too universal to eradicate at the time. It could only continue until the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and industrial nations began construction of nuclear warheads sufficient to extinguish all the greater life forms on the planet.

The church was the single comprehensive, trans-national authority in the Western world for more than a thousand years. …The main determinant of reality and value in Western civilization was expressed in the belief structures it presented….Here is the deepest source and support for the patriarchal tradition of Western civilization. It is also the most profound challenge in terms of the reversal taking place in our understanding of reality and value. The sense of the sacred in any civilization is precisely that which cannot be questioned, for the sense of the sacred is the unquestionable answer to all questions.

The biblical tradition begins with the creation narrative wherein the Earth Mother of the eastern Mediterranean is abandoned in favour of the transcendent Heaven Father. Later the relationship between the human and the divine is constituted in terms of a covenant between a chosen people and a personal transcendent creative Father deity. This becomes the context in which human-divine affairs are worked out over the succeeding centuries. The natural world is no longer the locus of the meeting of the divine and the human. A subtle aversion develops toward the natural world, a feeling that humans in the depth of their beings do not really belong to the earthly community of life, but to a heavenly community. We are presently in a state of exile from our true country.

In the Bible narrative, woman becomes the instrument for the entry of evil into the world and for the breakdown in human-divine relations. Only in a derivative sense, through their association with men, do women function in the public life of the sacred community. Later, in explanation of the lesser quality of female being, women are seen as biologically the consequence of some lack of vigour in the male component of the conception process, since in its full energy conception should produce a male child. In this context the whole of feminine existence becomes profoundly diminished as a mode of personal being.

Third patriarchal establishment: the nation state

The next patriarchal establishment that needs consideration is the nation-state…The nation-state might be considered the most powerful institution ever invented for organizing human societies. Above all, the concept of national sovereignty came into being. This concept might be considered a supreme expression of what we are here designating as patriarchy, the aggressive use of power in pursuit of the male values of conquest and dominion… The various Western people have consistently gone to war over the past few centuries in defence of national honour and in a vain effort at national security. This has led in turn to citizen armies, to universal conscription for military purposes. Such armies in modern times are an invention of the nation-state…

Beyond the concept of total war is also the concept of world war. These wars have become so endemic, the instruments of warfare so destructive, and the financial cost of military activities so exhausting that we must wonder how long these conflicts and the threat of such conflicts can endure. They are driven obviously by the deepest of our civilizational pathologies, originating, as so many pathologies, in some distorted sense of the sacred.

As with the ancient empires and the ecclesiastical establishment, so now with the nation-state; it was an affair carried out by men and for the ideals of men. Women were without power in the public realm, in its values, or in its functioning. Women functioned in areas withdrawn from the public life of the society: in the home, caring for children, serving men…Women did not participate in the electoral process in the United States until 1920, and in Great Britain until 1928. Even as late as 1987, there were only 2 women in the 100-member U.S. Senate, 24 in the 411-member House of Representatives. The first woman member of the Supreme Court was appointed in 1981. This type of imbalance was no longer acceptable to women, who comprise more than half the population. They were no longer willing to accept such control over their lives or over the public life of the society or over the integral functioning of the Earth. The feminist movement became a pervasive influence through society.

Fourth patriarchal establishment: the business corporation

The corporation sells itself as eroticized mother (1970).

Whether industrial, financial, or commercial, the corporation is considered the primary instrument of “progress,” although just what progress means is never clear. The supposition seems to be that the greater the devastation of the natural world through construction of highways, airports, development projects, shopping malls, supermarkets, and corporate headquarters, the closer we are to fulfilling the American Dream. It is precisely through this dream vision of a new humanly-created wonderworld that the advertising industry brings about that level of heightened consumption upon which the corporation depends for its ever-increasing control over our society and its ever-increasing profits. Through advertising the corporation has gained control over the public media. Through the public media the corporation controls the deepest psychic as well as the most powerful physical forces of the planet.

Because the industrial-commercial corporation is so central to contemporary existence, our educational programs have become subservient to its control. High school and college students must prepare themselves for jobs within this industrial-commercial setting. This industrial context of American life can be thought of as an all-enclosing bubble. Outside the bubble there is neither life nor joy nor any decent manner of human fulfilment. Within the bubble we can live and work and earn money and enjoy the ever-fascinating programs flowing across the television screen. In support of this process, our scientific research institutes—those in the universities and technical schools and those within industrial establishments—are constantly at work inventing a multitude of products that range from vast instruments of nuclear warfare to the frivolous products that have no purpose other than making a profit for some enterprising entrepreneur.

Since the 1880s this has been the age of the engineers, people of inventive genius joining scientific knowledge with technological skills, especially in the electronic and petrochemical industries. With this knowledge and these skills our engineers can build the great hydroelectric dams that destroy our rivers; drown our soil in chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; throw satellites into space until the debris begins to clutter the heavens; and invent a million varieties of plastic objects that are scattered over both the land and the sea. They can do all that, but they seem to have not the slightest idea of how to establish a mutually enhancing mode of human presence upon the Earth. They only make the human a deadly and intolerable presence on the planet.

The difficulty with our industrial wonderworld is that its products last for a brief period and then forever remain as a trashed and toxic world in which we and all future generations are condemned to live for an indefinite period. Like the illusion of a magician, we are presented with the blissful moment in the use of these inventions, with no indication of their abiding dark aspect. Human productions do not consistently renew themselves in the manner of natural forms.

The Styrofoam cup used momentarily in some fast-food establishment must either remain forever in some ever-mounting trash deposit or else release its toxic components into the environment when it is destroyed. So with hospital equipment, so with plastic diapers. To label such products as “disposable” is to falsify the reality. In the natural world there is no such problem as that of disposing of some product. The waste product from one life-form is the nourishment of another. We, on the other hand, are making a world of universal waste and maximal entropy.

As noted by Elizabeth Dodson Gray, this inability to deal with waste matter is a typical failure of the male in our society. Cleanup tasks have consistently been left for the women. As men have seldom shared in the cleanup tasks associated with their biological children, so they reveal their incompetence and lack of concern over the cleanup tasks associated with their industrial children. In this case, however, the consequences are a geological, biological, and ultimately, human disaster.

This is power. The power of men. The power to profoundly disturb the most significant functioning of the Earth. Women have had minimal presence, except as needed for service positions. In this regard, over the generations women have consistently been exploited by the various business processes. In the early days of the textile industry, women were employed as cheap labour that developed into the sweatshop system in the large cities of the East. In various business ventures women did the secretarial work. They were file clerks, typists, waitresses, cleanup persons. More professional roles were found in nursing, social work, teaching, writing. Some women had brilliant careers in the performance arts: in music and song and dance and drama.

Yet these have not been the positions of power that are needed to alter the larger directions taken by our society. Those positions are still held by men, and for their own purposes. If mitigations have appeared, they have served only to make industrial processes more endurable…the tendency to constantly modify an existing system without changing the basic pattern of its functioning. What is needed is a profound alteration of the pattern itself, not some modification of the pattern. To achieve this, the basic principle of every significant revolution needs to be asserted: rejection of partial solutions….The pain to be endured from the change must be experienced as a lesser pain to that of continuing the present course.

A pathology beyond adequate description or comprehension

The four patriarchal establishments have made a world that carries within it a certain pathos. Assuredly there is grandeur in many of its achievements. Enormous energies have been expended in what has been thought to be beneficial to the larger human process. To realize suddenly that so much of this has been misdirected, alienating, and destructive beyond anything previously known in human history is a bitter moment indeed….Only in the late twentieth century, have the awesome dimensions of our cultural and institutional pathologies become clarified.

None of the other revolutionary movements in Western civilization has prepared us for what we must now confront. Quite naturally this demand for change, as with all such moments of radical confrontation, brings with it a heightened level of psychic intensity. Everything is at stake. This is something more than feminine resentment at personal neglect or oppression. It is possibly the most complete reversal of values that has taken place since the Neolithic period.

The ethical basis of our judgment concerning good and evil is itself being identified as anti-feminist, anti-human, anti-Earth. Our legal system is seen as supportive of a patriarchal bias against the feminine dimension of the human and therefore as offensive to the human itself. The legal system is especially deficient in its radical inability to deal with questions of human-Earth relationships. The medical profession has made some shocking mistakes in its inability to deal with the simplest aspects of the well-being of women and of children in their infant stage. Also it is revealing its inability to function effectively as a profession in the public arena in relation to the continuing toxification of the entire biosphere. When the breast milk of women becomes questionable nourishment for infants because of its contamination with toxins, something more in the form of public protest might be expected from the medical profession, as well as from the legal profession and the professional moralists.

The greatest support for the feminist, anti-patriarchal movement can be found in the ecological movement. As regards the ecological integrity of the Earth, the four establishments that we have mentioned all come under condemnation as leading to a non-viable mode of the human and even to a non-viable mode of the Earth in its major life systems. As Norman Myers has indicated, we are bringing about an “extinction spasm” that is likely to produce “the greatest setback to the abundance and variety of life since the first flickering of life on Earth some four billion years ago.” That we should presently be killing off the rain forests at the rate of some fifty acres per minute is an irreversible tragedy. When we consider especially that these rain forests contain fully half the living species of life upon the Earth and that they took some sixty-five million years to attain their present status, this is obviously a pathology beyond adequate description or comprehension.

The situation is further aggravated when we consider that none of the institutions that we have identified as the four basic patriarchal establishments has seriously protested the situation nor made serious efforts to stop its involvement in the process. They are indeed still fostering the industrial plundering of the planet as part of the progress myth from which the devastation took its beginning. What has become progressively clear is the association of the feminine issue with the ecological issue.

One of the main characteristics of the emerging ecological period is the move from a human-centred norm of reality and value to a nature-centred norm. We cannot expect life, the Earth, or the universe to fit into our rational human designs of how life, the Earth, or the universe should function. We must fit our thinking and our actions within the larger process. We must move from democracy to biocracy. We need a United Species, not a United Nations.

We came into being within the life community through the billions of years that it took to shape a world into which humans could be born. It has been a creative maternal process throughout, with all the violence of the primordial fireball, the supernova explosions, and the volcanic eruptions from within the Earth itself. However terrifying these transition moments, they have consistently been birth moments. We might hope that what we are now experiencing is another birth moment, yet the patriarchal period is too poignant in its past memories and its present realities for us to fully understand what is happening or what will emerge in the years to come. Too much of what we are doing is irreversible. What we can say is that the Earth seems to be rising in defence of herself and her children after this long period of patriarchal dominion.

The above is an edited synopsis of Patriarchy: A New Interpretation of History, from The Dream of the Earth, Thomas Berry, Sierra Club, 1988, 2006.

This article was originally published inThe Asian Age, 26 March 2014REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION

"When it comes to the sustenance of the economy, women act as experts and providers. Even though women’s work in providing sustenance is the most vital activity, a patriarchal economy treats it as non-work."

Over the last four decades, I have served the Earth and grassroots ecological movements, beginning with the historic Chipko Movement (Hug the Tree Movement), in the Central Himalaya.

Every movement in which I participated, I noticed that women were the decision-makers — they decided the course of action and even were unrelenting in protecting the land and the sources of their sustenance and livelihoods.

Women who were a part of the Chipko movement were protecting forests because deforestation and logging in Uttarakhand led to floods, draughts, landslides and other such natural disasters. It led to scarcity of fuel and fodder. It led to the disappearance of springs and streams, forcing women to walk longer and further for water.
The dominant paradigm of forestry is based on monocultures of commercial species where forests are seen as timber mines that produce timber and generate revenue and leads to profits. The women of the Chipko Movement taught the world and me that timber, revenue and profits were not the real products of the forest; the real products were soil, water and pure air.

Today, science refers to these as ecological functions of ecosystems. Illiterate women of the Garhwal Himalaya were four decades ahead of the scientists of the world. By 1981, the government was compelled to stop logging in the Central Himalaya.

On April 22, 2002, which is recognised as Earth Day, I was invited by women from a small hamlet named Plachimada in Palghat, Kerala, to join their struggle against Coca Cola which was mining 1.5 million litres of water a day and polluting the water that remained in their wells.

Women were forced to walk 10 kilometres every day in search for clean drinking water. Mylamma, a tribal woman leading the movement, said they would not walk further for water. Coca Cola must stop stealing their water. These women decided to set up a satyagraha (struggle for truth) camp opposite the Coca Cola factory. I too joined them in solidarity and over the years supported them. In 2004, Coca Cola was forced to shut down.

In 1984, a terrible disaster caused by a leak from Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal killed 3,000 people immediately. Still thousands of children are born with disabilities. Union Carbide is now owned by Dow, which refuses to take ownership of responsibility for justice. In 1984, as a response to the Bhopal disaster, I started a campaign, “No more Bhopals, plant a Neem”.

The women of Bhopal were also victims of the disaster. But they did not let their hopes and fight for justice wane. For example, Rashidabi and Champadevi Shukla continued their struggle for justice. They also provide rehabilitation to the children born with disabilities. They have set up a Chingari Trust to honour women fighting corporate injustice. In 2012, they invited me to give the Chingari award to the women fighting against the nuclear power plant at Kudankulam, Tamil Nadu.

In 1994, I came to know that the use of neem to control pests and diseases in agriculture has been patented by US department of agriculture and multinational WR Grace. We launched a neem campaign to challenge the biopiracy. More than 100,000 Indians signed to initiate a case in the European Patent Office. I joined hands with Magda Alvoet, the president of the European Greens and Linda Bullard, president of International Foundation for Organic Agriculture to fight the case for 11 years. On March 8, 2005, on International Women’s Day, the European patent office struck down the biopiracy patent.

Why there’s a trend of women leading ecology movements against deforestation and pollution of water, against toxic and nuclear hazards? I partly believe that in the division of labour, it is women who have been left to look after sustenance — providing food, water, health and care.

When it comes to the sustenance of the economy, women act as both experts and providers. Even though women’s work in providing sustenance is the most vital human activity, a patriarchal economy which defines the economy only as the economy of the marketplace, treats it as non work.

The patriarchal model of the economy is dominated by one figure, the gross domestic product, which is measured on the basis of an artificially created production boundary (if you produce what you consume, you do not produce).
When the ecological crisis created by an ecologically blind economic paradigm leads to the disappearance of forests and water, spread of diseases because of toxics and poisons, and the consequent threat to life and survival, it is women who rise to wake up the society to the crisis, and to defend the Earth and lives. Women are leading the paradigm shift to align the economy with ecology. After all, both are rooted in the word “oikos” — our home.
Not only are women experts in the sustenance economy. They are experts in ecological science through their daily participation in processes that provide sustenance. Their expertise is rooted in lived experience and not in abstract and fragmented knowledge, which cannot see through the connectedness of the web of life.

The rise of masculinist science with Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, Bacon led to the domination of reductionist mechanistic science and a subjugation of knowledge systems based on interconnections and relationships. This includes all indigenous knowledge systems and women’s knowledge.

The most violent display of mechanistic science is in the promotion of industrial agriculture, including genetically modified organisms as a solution to hunger and malnutrition.

Industrial agriculture uses chemicals developed for warfare as inputs. Genetic engineering is based on the idea of genes as “master molecules” giving unidirectional commands to the rest of the organism. The reality is that living systems are self-organised, interactive and dynamic. The genome is fluid.

As these issues move centrestage in every society, it is women who bring the alternatives through biodiversity and agroecology that offer real solutions to the food and nutrition crisis.

As I have learnt over 30 years of building the Navdanya movement, biodiversity produces more than monocultures. Small family farms based on women’s participation provide 75 per cent of the food eaten in the world. Industrial agriculture only produces 25 per cent, while using and destroying 75 per cent of the Earth’s resources.

When it comes to real solutions to real problems faced by the planet and people, it is the subjugated knowledge and invisible work of women based on co-creation and co-production with nature that will show the way to human survival and well being in the future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vandana Shiva is the executive director of the Navdanya Trust. Navdanya means “nine seeds” (symbolizing protection of biological and cultural diversity) and also the “new gift” (for seed as commons, based on theright to save and share seeds In today’s context of biological and ecological destruction, seed savers are the true givers of seed. This gift or “dana” of Navadhanyas (nine seeds) is the ultimate gift – it is a gift of life, of heritage and continuity. Conserving seed is conserving biodiversity, conserving knowledge of the seed and its utilization, conserving culture, conserving sustainability.